Praxis and Revolution, by Eva von Redecker (Preface to the American Edition)

Preface to the American Edition

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ocieties change. If they did not, they would be unable to confront challenges, solve crises, and handle confrontations. They would be unable to survive. Among those changes, the label “revolution” is reserved for the most radical and profound type of transformation.

Reforms may address parts of a society, but revolutions affect the whole. Speaking of “revolution” also transports the hope that such change is not just happening to people, but driven by them, and for the better. Like coups and elections, revolutions can result in new governments. But their aim is normally larger: it is to bring about entirely new forms of government, with institutions that increase self-determination. Constitutional assemblies, parliaments, and councils were all “made by revolution.” But revolutions can also directly target social structures. While political revolutions locate the domination they aim to overthrow between governments and people, social ones attack the oppressive relations between groups brought into hierarchy by material distribution and identity formation. Social revolutions can challenge not just how we are ruled, but who we are, who owns what, how we relate to one another, and how we reproduce our material life.

Despite the much-desired scope and ambition that the concept of revolution evokes, its received form is at odds with the contemporary landscape of struggles.

Neither a “big bang” nor a “core contradiction” approach to revolution fits the multiple sites of organizing, occupying, and rebelling that social movements pursue at present.

However, revolution need not be understood as sudden and unified—this is at least what Praxis and Revolution argues. The book sets out to show that even the prototypical revolution in France 1789 is better reconstructed as processual

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and as driven from various peripheries. The reader will spend more time in prison cells, knitting circles, affinity groups, and antechambers than at the Bastille, and they will have ample opportunity to meet the revolution there.

In order to construct a theoretical model of an expanded understanding of revolution, Praxis and Revolution adds two specific terms to our thinking about radical change: the notion of interstices and the concept of metalepsis.

Those terms are not exactly self-explanatory. In the book itself, they are laid out within a framework of social theory, a framework that synthesizes and updates philosophical debates on practice, on structures, on rules and agency. Here, in the opening, I simply want to introduce “interstices” and “metalepsis” by way of illustration. I start in reverse order, with the more obscure term.

“Metalepsis”—like “dialectics”—is a term of ancient rhetoric. And like dialectics, when borrowed to theorize history, this term addresses the question of how we get from here to there. Dialectics, as the basis of left-Hegelian or Marxist philosophy of history, asserts that the force of contradictions can move us to the place of their resolution. Metalepsis is concerned with a similar passage, but gives it a different flavor: How do we get from this total mess to a place where things make sense?1 How indeed, if the mess won’t even fit into the mold of one supercharged contradiction? Metalepsis, as a figure of speech, is on the surface utterly absurd and unintelligible. Not the kind of neat metaphorical stand-in of one word for a recognizably similar other. Not “sail” or “vessel” for “ship.” More something like “a specimen of what the rats would desert first.” That is, you need to know a whole different play on words to provide the context that allows you to decode the first. It makes one’s brain hurt a bit, but revolutions, as history can tell, are not easy or straightforward either. Nor are they always possible, since history is not set up as a riddle. The idea of metalepsis is rather that sometimes, through partly contingent circumstances, structural conjunctures ensue that allow for the replacement of old with new. Not every unintelligible sentence is a play on words. But whether or not a given sequence might be one is never fully determined by its given form. It depends on what kinds of clues are brought up in the course of guessing. This guessing, in historical struggles, is not a linguistic activity, at least not one detached from material practice. Metaleptic replacement is when one of the ultimate tools of fossil-gadget-powered petty masculinity—the leaf blower—was used during the Portland protests to blow back teargas onto the police. Metaleptic replacement is when, for a precious period of two weeks, the Share-a-ton opens in insurrectionary Minneapolis. Its name and its practice fuse in double metonymy the riches of a hitherto privately owned hotel chain, the Sheraton, with an economy of abundance: share a ton. Taken over by activists, though apparently with a certain level of consent

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by the former management, the hotel opened its doors to the unhoused in the city and those who needed shelter in the midst of uprising. Its operations amazed observers: While no one seemed to be in charge, somehow, overnight, the operation provided not just the services of a hotel—complete with volunteers pushing carts of linens down the halls for housekeeping—but a health clinic and a donation drop-off site. What had been a conference room now bore hand-drawn signs saying “HARM REDUCTION,” with condoms for the taking and Narcan at the ready. Residents were encouraged to participate in tasks and decision making, and, together with the volunteers, they had nightly meetings to discuss things like the name and security of the sanctuary.2

This sanctuary, a place hardly intelligible in the existing order of things, is one example for what is meant by interstices. It is a short-lived anomaly, yet it forms a crack through which a possible different future illuminates the present. The Share-a-ton did not last, facing eviction as well as internal collapse, which goes to show that revolution in one interstice is impossible. The dots need to be joined.

Yet for that to happen, nothing “else,” no recourse to a totally different order is required. What is needed is more of those breaks with the same. More interstices that cultivate abundant relationality and counter oppression, more metaleptic sites of refunctioning what is already there, more footholds from which to push back against reaction. This commitment to the interstitial might come as a disappointment for pumped-up dreams of revolutionary militancy and discipline, but those are bound to be disappointed anyway.

Interstitial activism is antiheroic. Its attitude is captured in one North American moment of this otherwise terribly European book, when a gender-queer diva from the ranks of ACT UP is promoting siding with failure. Siding with failure is something entirely different than failure alone. To occupy the site of failure is to refuse abandonment, to persist in struggle, and to nourish concrete hope. And not to abandon the weak, in times of a pandemic affirmed by neoliberal autocrats as deadly selection, can amount to an encompassing revolutionary program. “No one is sacrificed. Everyone is essential” is the motto of a sketched revolution that the Black Lives Matter cofounder Opal Tometi and the filmmaker Avi Lewis narrated in October 2020.3 Metaleptically reviewing the bleak present from the future, they formulate an interstitial focus: “What was needed was a spark. That spark was us.”

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I only started studying the Black Radical Tradition after completing this book, in the context of a subsequent project on property and capitalist domination. I realized that I had been ignorant of a wellspring of theorizing on interstitial change while writing a book on it. Many of the motifs I originally encountered in German Jewish anarchists like Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber have been constitutive for Black Liberation for centuries, since the practice of marooning as exodus from slavery. Those enclaves of freedom were essential for organizing the escape routes for enslaved people from the South to the North, and in the Caribbean they formed partisan bases for the Haitian Revolution.4 In the twentieth century, it is especially in Black Feminist engagement with the Black Panther Party that the insistence on sustained interstitial politics was formulated— most famously perhaps in Audre Lorde’s reflections on Malcolm X’s legacy, which contain the crucial slogan “Revolution is not a one-time event.”5 In “Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century,” Kehinde Andrews also equates Black Liberation with a “concrete politics” starting “in your home, you community, your school.”6 One effect of the interstitial extension of revolutionary politics is an overcoming of the private vs. public divide. This overcoming surpasses and reverses bourgeois feminist logics. Not “the personal is political,” but “the revolution is interstitial.” No longer detached from the reproduction of everyday life, radical politics can be seen as arising from the labor of care and from the concrete concern for freedom and survival in oppressed communities. In this vein, Alexis Pauline Gumbs powerfully demonstrates how we might open the concept of mothering onto politics. “Mothering,” she writes, is “a queer collaboration with the future” and “a technology of transformation.”7 But it is not just that the political dimension of reproduction comes to the fore in the interstitial perspective. It is also that radical politics can articulate their dependency on sustenance. Caring for the revolution equals making it. Siding with the precarious side of failure, if done in the spirit of radical reproduction, reaches beyond failure. The Black Lives Matter facilitator maree adrienne brown grounds the detached Beckettian mantra “fail, fail again, fail better” in a Black ecofeminist spirit. Discussing nonlinear and iterative movement practice, she claims: “In that paradigm there is no failure. Everything we attempt, everything we do, is either growing up as its roots go deeper, or it’s decomposing, leaving its lessons in the soil for the next attempt.”8

3 This book provides a long argument for interstitial revolution, and a detailed model of it. That model integrates the mechanism of metalepsis to overcome the

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most obvious rejoinder to prefigurative politics: that the transition from the smallscale to the whole is unaccounted for. Of course, the notion of metaleptic transfer, of refunctioning messy sequences in the light of hitherto interstitial alternatives, has drawn rejoinders of its own. I will briefly touch on the two most salient ones. The first critique, which my colleagues Frieder Vogelmann and Martin Nonhoff raised and helped me think through, is concern with the lack of “struggle” in my approach. I of course retort that care can be a hell of a struggle, but it is true: this is not a model of agonistic politics. I believe that much bolder transformation is made in contamination and refunctioning than in confrontation. I see little radical potential in the left seizing hegemony with the correctly configured antagonism. Revolution must be more than counter-counter-revolution. But this is not an argument against barricades; in itself it is not even one against violence.

Riots in the line of Vicky Osterweil’s reasoning can be seen as a perfectly prefigurative practice, a form of “queer birth” as she describes them: “riots struggle in the sphere of social reproduction: looting makes day-to-day life easier by changing the price of goods to zero, relieves pressure by spreading wealth in the community, and reinforces bonds of solidarity and kinship through mutual struggle and action.”9 Now that we are in a supermarket, the second line of critique is immediately at hand. Is this a model to tackle capitalism? Isn’t the recourse to the French Revolution, and the neat fit with antiracist and feminist articulations, an indication that processual, interstitial change only works for overcoming status-orders or personal domination? I sometimes want to say, “Dude, if you think that feminism is so much easier to solve than anticapitalism, then what are you still doing there in my way?” but I nevertheless share the concern. This book doesn’t theorize capitalism, but it commits me to the claim that capitalist domination, even of the impersonal kind, can be reconstructed in practice-theoretical terms. In my new book Revolution for Life, I sketch capitalism as the order that is anchored in the modern property form and has resulted in alignments that perpetuate the practice of investment and emission.10 I have never been convinced by the claim that capital, as self-valorization of value, was altogether dissevered from human agency, yet prone to produce crises that opened it up for intervention. Isn’t that just a slightly hyperbolic way to say that it is aggregated yet not entirely beyond disaggregation?

Today, we are confronted not only with the wealth of capitalists to reappropriate but also with the debris of past production to deal with. We face not only the material interests of the ruling class but also a wave of neofascist phantomowners siding with them.11 In this situation, a narrowly workerist model of revolutionary agency—even if that agency were to actualize—is impotent. We need

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not only to expropriate the expropriators but also to abolish propertized oppression, not only to overcome alienation but also to repair catastrophic damage and bear lasting loss. This book does not invoke the concept of revolution in order to show that the task itself is easy. How could it, after so many defeats and failures? And yet, the interstitial lens may help to see what has already begun.

3 This text, in its journey from German PhD to book, is already wrapped in many layers of gratitude spelled out at the end of the German preface. The extraordinary privilege and joy of seeing it translated into English require further additions. I am very grateful to Lowell Frye at Columbia University Press for shepherding the production of the book through a pandemic, to two anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful reports, and to my wonderful editors, Wendy Lochner and Amy Allen, for their support and enthusiasm. I also want to thank Raymond Geuss and Judith Butler for their generous words of encouragement at the outset. All of my amazing students from fall 2015 at the New School helped open my eyes to North American politics, and Mithra Lehn, Mariam Matar, and Marianna Poyares have remained indispensable interlocutors ever since.

At the center of this book, and my gratitude, is the person who actually translated it, Lucy Duggan, my friend and my favorite novelist. Putting the original text into the hands of someone who, I have to admit, is better with words than I myself was an extraordinary fortune. It also was a lot of fun, leading to long linguistic discussions and mutual challenges in scrutiny and inventiveness. Funding for the translation was thankfully provided by the Börsenverein des deutschen Buchhandels. I am obliged to Raymond Geuss for double-checking that the translation of the Greek background literature on metalepsis was correct. In the tedious effort of translating the references while libraries were in lockdown, Ann Copestake provided me with additional PDFs and with moral support, and Lynn Hunt was unbelievably helpful when her English page numbers were the last ones left that I could not track down. Fulvia Modica then lifted my own page numbers and magically transformed them into that condensed version of a book known as its index.

Throughout and all over again, Aurélie Herbelot helped me to say what I had to say and to cut the crap.

“A wild dinner party of a political theory book! Through an extraordinary crossing of thinkers and genres, and careful work with the political potential of metalepsis and interstices, this book wrests revolution from its high modern formation to make it a lived and practical work for our times. Erudite, rigorous, playful, and readable, at once in the world and floating above it, Eva von Redecker is a brilliant and wondrous intellectual, driven by the philosophical question of how we can open a better future from what we do now.”

Wendy Brown, author of In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West “Praxis and Revolution is a brilliant investigation that brings together conceptual analysis and literary reading. In a political and theoretical situation in which only either a mere continuation of the present condition or an empty gesture of rupture seems possible, von Redecker points a way out of the aporias that block our thought and action.”

Christoph Menke, author of Critique of Rights “Praxis and Revolution revisits and rearticulates the fundamental conceptual vocabulary of revolution for our times. A brilliant tour de force, this work draws upon philosophy, political sociology, history, rhetoric, science studies, and feminist and queer theory to orchestrate a new understanding of revolution, rupture, performative change, structure, event, practice, and transformation. Singular in its interdisciplinary richness and capacity to translate among political vocabularies, von Redecker’s book unleashes from the resources of the past a set of vocabularies that allow us to rethink time, history, and praxis. Ambitious and incisive, this work stands out as thoughtful and capacious, refusing reductive slogans and polemics in favor of attentive readings and the rigors of imagining the world anew.”

Judith Butler, author of The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind “This is an original philosophical treatment of the problem of radical social change: how it comes about, to what extent it can be initiated voluntarily, within what limits it might be controllable, how it ought to be evaluated. I am impressed by the seriousness of purpose, the ambition, and the rigor.”

Raymond Geuss, author of Who Needs a World View?

Eva von Redecker is a German critical theorist and public philosopher, currently based at the University of Verona as the recipient of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship. She was previously a research associate at Humboldt University of Berlin and she has also taught at Goethe University Frankfurt and the New School.

Lucy Duggan is a writer and translator. She is the author of the novel Tendrils (2014).

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New Directions in Critical Theory Columbia University Press / New York cup.columbia.edu PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.